It will be appreciated that in recent years banking customers have increasingly become accustomed to using automatic teller machines (ATMs). These have been relatively successful because they provide a simple and clear "menu" of choices to the consumer at each step of each transaction, such that the customer is very readily led through the sequence of inputs required by the system to respond to the customer's request. It would be desirable if such functions could also be carried out by the consumer in the privacy of his own home, thus rendering the service more convenient and thus more likely to be commonly used.
Presently, the most widely used personal computers are manufactured by IBM Corporation (the "IBM PC" or "PC") or so called "clones" thereof. The software for the PC's is currently so widely used that it is advisable for the home computer, employed for accessing computerized services, such as banking, to be compatible with the PC's.
To date, substantially all PC's have been configured to comprise a keyboard of between 60 and 101 keys, a display device, and a housing containing the circuit boards of the computer including various interfaces to other devices such as modems for communication, printers and the like. Such PC's, while increasingly popular, still intimidate many potential users. Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a computer which conforms to the functionality of the PC--that is, for example, which runs software developed for banking applications so that it can interface with banking computers, exactly as if it were in fact a conventional PC--while providing a user-friendly, simplified and nonthreatening appearance. In particular, it is desired to place a computer having PC functionality within a package physically resembling an essentially conventional telephone.
Copending Application Ser. No. 260,832 filed Oct. 21, 1988 discloses generally a telephone-resembling device which performs computer functions as well as conventional telephone functions, while presenting a user-friendly appearance. That application Ser. No. 07/260,832, is incorporated by reference herein, and the present invention is related to the invention described in Ser. No. 260,832.
It will be apparent to those of skill in the art that the provision of 37 PC functionality", that is, the ability to run conventional PC software programs without modification to the software, places very substantial constraints on the design of a computer which is to fit within a housing conforming in size and shape to that of conventional telephone. For example, substantially all PC programs are designed to be stored on "floppy disks", or are initially supplied on floppy disks and later copied to a "hard disk". Both of these memory devices require more space than is available in the housing of a conventional telephone. Similarly, the circuit boards used conventionally in PCs are much too large to fit within a conventional telephone, as are the keyboards which are conventionally used. Accordingly, it is not possibly to simply shoehorn the normal PC components into a housing resembling a conventional telephone. Moreover, it is desirable in any event to eliminate the use of removable floppy disks and the like from the device provided according to the invention, to simplify its operation and to render it even more user-friendly, and thus accessible to a wider class of possible users.
various firms, including AT&T and Sears, Roebuck & Co., have provided home banking services employing home terminals which communicate with bank service computers. These have either involved "dumb terminals", i.e., terminal devices having no intelligence, or conventional PC's. Nether system is fully user-friendly, since both require some computer literacy on the part of the user.
It will also be appreciated that if a home terminal is to provide access to a banking computer to perform financial transactions, a very high degree of security must be built into the system, such that the user cannot corrupt his own or other accounts, cannot withdraw assets from other accounts, and most importantly cannot cause a system error of a type which would cause the entire bank computer system to cease operations, however briefly. To do so means that the home terminal must interact with the network in a sophisticated way. It is also highly desirable that the interaction of terminal and host be amenable to convenient alteration at a later time if it should become necessary.
For example, there have recently been widely publicized instances of "software viruses" which permeate computer networks. The chaos caused in a banking system susceptible to such a virus can hardly be imagined. The prior art teaches no system which provides anything
It is therefore very important that the home computer be updatable, remotely from the host, with respect to hardware and software changes necessary to eliminate such bugs or viruses, and to introduce new security features, such as data encryption. remotely resembling this set of features in a terminal intended for home use for accessing a banking system.
It is another object of the invention to provide a user home terminal which is suitable for banking functions as indicated above and which would additionally be useful in accessing other sort of data bases which support, for example making airline reservations, obtaining stock quotes, accessing news tickers, accessing directory "white" and "yellow pages", and the like. Again, while various computer systems are available essentially for home use for providing these functions, in substantially all cases these are conventional personal computers which still intimidate a large fraction of the potential user market. Accordingly it is an object of the invention to provide these functions as well in a user-friendly, non-intimidating compact terminal generally resembling a telephone.
Megatel Computer (1986) Corporation, of Weston, Ontario, Canada, with which at least one of the inventors named herein is affiliated, has been selling for more than a year prior to the filing date of this application a single board computer which is capable of emulating an IBM Personal Computer and running conventional software programs intended for use with conventional IBM PCs. This Megatel computer has on its single circuit board a microprocessor, typically a Nippon Electric Corporation (NEC) model V25 or V40, a programmable gate array chip sold by Xilinx Corporation under Model No. XC2018 or the equivalent, both random access memory (RAM) and read-only memory (ROM) and various input-output devices as well as associated connectors and the like. Briefly stated, the use of the programmable gate array to connect the microprocessor to the memory and to the input-output devices has provided this computer with unparalleled flexibility in emulation of the basic functions of an IBM PC, such that it is capable of running substantially all conventional software programs for the IBM PC. This is true even though in many applications the Megatel computer is not connected to external magnetic storage media, printers and the like, and even though the software normally would only run on computers thus configured. To fully understand the significance of this fact, a brief discussion of the IBM PC marketplace is in order.
As a rule, conventional software programs are stated to be "PC-compatible" when they are intended to be run on the IBM Personal Computer (PC). However, not all "PC-compatible" programs will run on all PC's. That is, for example, one program may require a so-called "hard disk" having 40 megabytes storage capacity. Another may require one megabyte of RAM. A third may require an optical disk; a fourth a "VGA adapter card", and a fifth, two floppy disks. Thus, "PC-compatibility" only implies with respect to a particular software program that a PC can be configured with appropriate devices and peripherals on which the software will then run; it does not mean that all "PC-compatible" software will run on the same PC.
The basic hardware components of the PC itself, as distinguished from its peripherals, include a microprocessor, a certain amount of read-only and random-access memory ("ROM" and "RAM" respectively), and circuit elements providing logical connection between these various basic components as well as to the keyboard and the display, and to any peripherals such as modems, printers, external memory and the like. The peripherals are normally connected directly to various dedicated "driver" and "interface" chips, which are in turn connected by logic circuit elements to the microprocessor, RAM and ROM. Thus, all PC's require some sort of hardware, i.e., discrete circuit elements, to provide appropriate logical connections to functionally "glue" the microprocessor, RAM, ROM, and the various dedicated input/output devices and peripheral drivers together.
Certain software, referred to as the "BIOS", for Basic Input/Output System, is also essential to provide the "PC architecture". The BIOS provides the interface between the usual PC-compatible software programs (which are also referred to the art as "DOS-compatible", which means that they are designed to work with IBM's Disk Operating System, or DOS; DOS is thus only useful if the BIOS and BIOS-compatible hardware are already in place) and the actual hardware elements. The hardware elements, plus the BIOS, thus form the basic "PC architecture".
In the IBM PC itself, a custom designed "gate array" chip is normally used to provide the logical connection between the microprocessor, the RAM and ROM, and the various dedicated input/output and peripheral driver elements. Various others have provided these functions using so-called programmable array logic (PAL) chips. Such PALs comprise a number of predefined but not preconnected logic gates on a chip. Connections are established by fusing fusible links disposed on the chip. Having thus been programmed, the PAL circuitry cannot be further altered.
Megatel has been selling for more than one year prior to the filing date of this application a single-board computer in which the function of logically connecting the microprocessor to the memory, input/output and other devices is provided by a programmable gate array (PGA) chip, also sometimes referred as a logic cell array (LCA) chip, made by Xilinx, Inc. of San Jose, Calif. and second sourced by other firms. The BIOS used by Megatel in this computer is also commercially available. The "glue" required to functionally connect the microprocessor, the memory, and the input-output chips is provided by configuring the PGA chip by supply of a series of signals, referred to by Xilinx as "configuration programs" and sometimes herein as "configuration code" or "configuration software". Essentially, this configuration code defines the logical connection of various basic logic elements on the PGA chip.
The Xilinx "Programmable Gate Array Data Book" (1988) discusses at pages 6-38 to 6-40 use of this technology for "self-Diagnosing Hardware", suggesting that the device ". . . can perform diagnostic functions at power-up, or in test modes, and perform normal functions where the board is determined to be operational." It is specifically suggested that this will be particularly useful for testing peripheral control logic using loopback techniques, I/O and memory error detection circuitry, and interrupt techniques. It is an object of this invention to fully utilize these capabilities of the programmable gate array chip to provide very powerful test and configuration capabilities for the terminal of the invention.